


What To Write

by May



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-02
Updated: 2014-02-02
Packaged: 2018-01-10 23:50:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1166092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’d been six months into the journey on the meteor and some memory of old school corridors had flipped over in your mind and then you realised that everything was less than atoms. Roxy had grown up on a watery ghost planet. Some things sound derivative until they’re real.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What To Write

Roxy has pink tipped fingernails, the remnant of some private indulgent moment on an empty planet. She nibbles on one of them, not at all like the woman you knew but more like the girl you are.

“I guess it’s weird to think, for you,” she muses. “That nobody is alive anymore.”

It had taken a while for that to kick in, for the realisation to bring itself to a head. It’d been six months into the journey on the meteor and some memory of old school corridors had flipped over in your mind and then you realised that everything was less than atoms. Roxy had grown up on a watery ghost planet. Some things sound derivative until they’re real.

“Before I started talking to Jane and Jake, maybe even before I started talking to Dirk, there was this internet full of stuff. Dead stuff. Like, words and words full of things millions of dead people wrote, when their lives were just full of everything that kind of just was, back then, you know?” There’s no laborious melancholy to her voice – this isn’t an unveiling of the angst beneath the cheer. “It was weird, because they were dead, but I felt jealous of them, because they got to know all this stuff.”

“It was irrational,” you say. There’s something about speaking to Roxy that almost segues into incidental, until you become aware of something that sits like a shadow on the edge of your conscience. It’s waiting for something.

“Yeah.” Roxy tucks her hair behind her ear. The ends of her hair curls loosely just below her chin. Your mother wore rollers only sometimes, and you always thought it was some sarcastic grab at retro maternal glamour. Watching Roxy pick at her glittering fingernails turns some things over in your head like tables at a family excursion gone wrong. You thought you’d had all the time you needed on the meteor to pick over your childhood.

“It was weird, I guess. They were interested in so many things and I was, too, but there was nobody for me to talk to,” she says. “I posted stuff I wrote. I felt stupid because nobody was going to see it, then I realised that, yeah, nobody was going to see it.”

“What did you write about?” You wrote, too, and you used words like burst and miasma in your efforts to describe the meeting between man and monster. The yield of a mortal against the infinite of  the void. Well, you wrote _that_ sentence down early on.

“Lots. I wrote a novel, eventually, but, early on, I just wrote a bunch of short stories. There was a lot that nobody really understood. I ended up writing about things I never really even thought about happening, even though it was when I was alive and before me, too. After _she_ came, though, the stories other people wrote starting being different, too. Slowly, in all these different ways.”

You were wrong, in the end. You don’t really feel embarrassed about that, though. How were you to know that they have a full, burgeoning squirm and press against the inside even in ways that were intangible? And that they have a bright kind of cold that runs along the inside of the epidermis and an oily, nauseous kind of heaviness, afterwards? It could only really have been purged in fire.

“But I had already written all of the villains as her. Well, I guess I hadn’t done that first, but it felt like I had.”

“Yes.” You wonder if you would rewrite anything to reflect what you now know. You haven’t written in a long time, so if you did, maybe it would be a purely beige account, mundanely prosaic. “Did it help?”

Roxy pauses and stares at a point on the ground. Distantly, something happens and you think it can wait. “It helped, I think. It didn’t _hurt_ , I know that. I wrote about things I knew she had done but I didn’t like thinking about.”

“Fiction can be a good way to explore things, perhaps.” You could say how it felt but only a superficial rendering, somehow, even though it concerned every physical molecule of you. “And a way to express things without stating them, outright.”

Roxy nods and breathes, giving you a small smile. It’s sometimes a different face, you think, dimly. Then, she frowns. “Actually, it seemed like a lot of people started doing that. Writing down what they didn’t say. At least, they did for a while. And then I felt bad all over again, because I lived with things, but I didn’t _live with it_ , you know? Not really. I got the end result.”

“It was still yours to write about.” Though, it isn’t like that’s your blessing to give, either.

“Mmmm,” she says, absently.

“Some things hurt like that,” you say. You still don’t have that blessing, except for she has, all of a sudden, a kind of dogged hopefulness out of nowhere, and you slide over that feeling in jagged bumps.

“I wrote about her, I mean, uh…” she pauses and looks at you, and it clicks. It wasn’t as if you really forgot, but it’s far stranger to think of another you than it even is to meet another one of your mother. “I wrote about Rose more often. Because she was there and I did want her back.”

There’s a silence like…it’s not just heavy. It’s sweet and sharp, and it seems like something has shifted enough for you to know what you maybe could write about, now.

 


End file.
